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ItohRespectArmy posted:
I find this very interesting, especially in light of your follow-up message that you run PBTA games rather than 5e/PF. Can you perhaps remember? * Had these players played PBTA before? * If yes, had the incidents that inspired this happened in prior PBTA games? * If not, were they trying PBTA in the hope of avoiding these things?
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May 20, 2023 01:13
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hyphz posted:I find this very interesting, especially in light of your follow-up message that you run PBTA games rather than 5e/PF. Can you perhaps remember? 1. The vast majority of people in my games hadn't ever played anything over than 5e or maybe pathfinder and these examples for sure hadn't 3. Some people join my games very strictly looking for something new mechanics wise yeah, although plenty of them just hear the premise of say, monsterhearts and masks and are excited by that rather than the actual mechanics of it all. the 1st and the 3rd example really strike me as behaviours learned from d&d though, having had several experiences of that kind of stuff myself when I was younger.
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May 20, 2023 02:23
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ItohRespectArmy posted:1. The vast majority of people in my games hadn't ever played anything over than 5e or maybe pathfinder and these examples for sure hadn't So these could be examples of "D&D damage", but more to do with the GM than the system, or did the new system help? Mr. Grapes! posted:A local bar in my area wants to pay me to run a weekly campaign game there Kudos, they must have been really impressed!
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May 20, 2023 02:46
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hyphz posted:So these could be examples of "D&D damage", but more to do with the GM than the system, or did the new system help? The new system helped for sure because there was a bunch of stuff I could point to paticularly anxious players that I really am not out there to get you I swear which seemed to alleviate some concerns. After that I followed up with very specifically not sucker punching them or trying to catch them out and now it's a much more positive time. As for it being specifically d&d damage, I don't even think it's like the book d&d damage its the really strange developed culture that I seem to run into. Being in alot of ttrpg servers I seem to notice the very stereotypical memes about d&d where it's always like "the party are murderhobos, getting a nat 20 lets you do anything" and the final more worrying ones which are "wow the DM did this crazy hosed up thing! it's crazy how they all do this" that make me really raise my eyebrow. I don't really know what causes that besides bad gming and ingrained really bad ideas about gming within culture but it does seem to be a thing that happens.
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May 20, 2023 09:32
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PurpleXVI posted:Ehhhh, to me "Tucker's Kobolds" both felt adversarial and unfair. theironjef posted:If you actually read Tucker's Kobolds the story isn't so much that the kobolds are playing within the rules, it's that the players just aren't reacting at all. I suppose this might be us all filling in the blanks on a short story in different ways, because I can see how you'd assume either of these scenarios, too. Maybe a better thing to glean from it is that there's multiple "fair" and "unfair" ways to approach something like a marathon encounter it's implied to be? Are the PCs getting the chance to act? Are the kobold's doing "legal" damage or setting up traps with "fair" DCs? It's true all of that is left undeclared. ItohRespectArmy posted:The new system helped for sure because there was a bunch of stuff I could point to paticularly anxious players that I really am not out there to get you I swear which seemed to alleviate some concerns. After that I followed up with very specifically not sucker punching them or trying to catch them out and now it's a much more positive time. Honestly, I find a lot of the D&D memes about the PCs being dumb murder machines, the thrill/terror of natural 20s and natural 1s (which often don't actually follow the rules of what those rolls trigger in that specific D&D edition), and spiteful GMs pretty tiresome. I do agree they're still pervasive though. Alongside the perception of DMs being language lawyers about player narration. Sandbagging interesting ideas sounds lame but I don't know if that's ever something I've seen (recent) editions of D&D poo-poo. The DMG usually provides some sort of free-form "do a check like this if you don't know how to facilitate this otherwise" type advice that you'd think would enable that more often. Though I think a lot of that gets accidentally derailed in a D&D system because DMs try to facilitate a stunt through a series of skill or ability checks. Often contrasted with something like a spellcaster who can do similar poo poo at no risk at all. So like, a wizard casts fly go get over a wall. A druid polymorphs into a spider/bird/etc to get over it. The fighter or rogue have to hope they have enough rope, do a check to toss a grapple hook just right to catch on the top of the wall, make a climb check or three to get up, hope they don't get ambushed (might need a stealth check for that?), possibly scale down the other side with some more rolls, etc. Essentially, you end up in a situation where you go "Can I do this?" and the DM chuckles and says "Oh, well you can sure try, but be ready to roll X, Y, and Z." And a player gets indirectly put off that way.
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May 22, 2023 23:31
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I wonder if some of it is that it is a pretty common storyline feature prior to the end of the story for a character's fate (either way) to be reversed for dramatic effect; these sorts of twists and turns can create compelling storylines. The problem is that it feels different actually being that character who has those twists happening to them. Obviously it can be important for engagement to have something that keeps the players invested in the storyline and feeling great when they finally accomplish the end goal, but there needs to be some incremental wins along the way for many players (at least I need these) to not just give up.
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May 23, 2023 00:16
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Rick posted:I wonder if some of it is that it is a pretty common storyline feature prior to the end of the story for a character's fate (either way) to be reversed for dramatic effect; these sorts of twists and turns can create compelling storylines. The problem is that it feels different actually being that character who has those twists happening to them. Obviously it can be important for engagement to have something that keeps the players invested in the storyline and feeling great when they finally accomplish the end goal, but there needs to be some incremental wins along the way for many players (at least I need these) to not just give up. I mean, even in most stories you very rarely have one where it's all downhill for a character and then a sudden reverse at the end. It's more common to have a sharp decline right at the start, being stripped of their resources, before the story even really starts, in fact, and then a long sequence of clawing upwards.
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May 23, 2023 01:23
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In fiasco, the luckiest people in the ending are the ones who have had all good luck or bad luck. In terms of downer endings, sometimes it’s good to just end the session when the PCs have bungled everything. Especially in a one shot, you zoom out the camera to see the burning buildings, the ruined museum, and the booing crowd.
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May 23, 2023 05:49
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Golden Bee posted:In fiasco, the luckiest people in the ending are the ones who have had all good luck or bad luck. I find myself invoking that one long pan from Taxi Driver a lot.
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May 23, 2023 05:54
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Rick posted:I wonder if some of it is that it is a pretty common storyline feature prior to the end of the story for a character's fate (either way) to be reversed for dramatic effect; these sorts of twists and turns can create compelling storylines. The problem is that it feels different actually being that character who has those twists happening to them. Obviously it can be important for engagement to have something that keeps the players invested in the storyline and feeling great when they finally accomplish the end goal, but there needs to be some incremental wins along the way for many players (at least I need these) to not just give up. The push and pull of failure and success is absolutely innate to TTRPGs, I'd say. We wouldn't be deciding important actions through dice if we didn't want the risk of failure hanging over us. It's something that needs to be evenly applied across player actions though. It's also something where it helps if the players are voluntary participants in putting themselves at risk, and I like systems that reward that. There are still going to be some players who are more risk-averse, perhaps because they don't want anything bad to happen, or because they're worried about how bad they'd be hit for any misstep. That's another one of those frank discussions that should be happening with players at the start of the game, and something you check in on regularly.
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May 23, 2023 14:07
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Nuns with Guns posted:There are still going to be some players who are more risk-averse, perhaps because they don't want anything bad to happen, or because they're worried about how bad they'd be hit for any misstep. That's another one of those frank discussions that should be happening with players at the start of the game, and something you check in on regularly. I don't mind risks fundamentally, because I also don't mind failures that are interesting or funny, but I absolutely want A) some sort of metacurrency so I can succeed at the things I feel are super important to my character or whatever arc I've imagined for them or B) to fail on things that would be interesting or funny rather than just "nothing happens." One thing a lot of games lack is some sort of, uh, rubber-banding feature, where failures give you a metacurrency towards guaranteed successes in the future, because it's really easy to start losing interest in a session, or even an entire game, when random chance means you've failed nine out of ten rolls so far and might as well not have been present for the day since your character has impacted jack and poo poo.
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May 23, 2023 14:14
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PurpleXVI posted:I don't mind risks fundamentally, because I also don't mind failures that are interesting or funny, but I absolutely want A) some sort of metacurrency so I can succeed at the things I feel are super important to my character or whatever arc I've imagined for them or B) to fail on things that would be interesting or funny rather than just "nothing happens." You Awaken In A Strange Place does this well as a one session game. Fail at using a skill and you mark it down. Mark down three failures and you improve by one point in that skill. Unworkable in a long campaign but as a way of getting people to try poo poo it's pretty good.
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May 23, 2023 15:21
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Lamuella posted:You Awaken In A Strange Place does this well as a one session game. Fail at using a skill and you mark it down. Mark down three failures and you improve by one point in that skill. Unworkable in a long campaign but as a way of getting people to try poo poo it's pretty good. I feel like you could potentially make it work in a longer game if you just escalated the failures needed to learn, i.e. rather than a flat three tries, you needed tries equal to current score(plus or minus some sort of modifier). Where it would probably fall apart is that canny players might try to find zero-risk situations to try failing in, and also that with a certain skill catalogue it might have the strange effect where just bonking your head against something you have no comprehension of, with no assistance or literature, makes you understand it, like someone understanding electronics soldering by smashing circuit boards with a rock.
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May 23, 2023 15:32
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Nuns with Guns posted:The push and pull of failure and success is absolutely innate to TTRPGs, I'd say. We wouldn't be deciding important actions through dice if we didn't want the risk of failure hanging over us. Oh man, the issues with this. Yes, this is the theory. But in many RPG books, especially in their examples, dice aren't treated like this. Instead, dice are treated as just a handy tool to say your actions are acceptable. To quietly inject the chance of failure so that you don't feel like you're doing a "fear of girls" style wish fulfilment but with the assumption that chance will never actually come up. The number of RPGs in which the example of play never contains any failures is amazing. In some games, like Continuum, this omission actually damages the game significantly. Some even take it further. No Thank You Evil has rules for big dramatic group action rolls and these are used at the climax of all the sample adventures. None of them ever consider the possibility of the roll failing, and in some cases they significantly break the adventure.
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May 23, 2023 17:17
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hyphz posted:Oh man, the issues with this. Most games I've encountered will give examples of "failure" but it's often in a flat way that doesn't have very complex outcomes. Stuff like "your attack misses" or "the guards don't believe you" or "you try to hide but you're spotted." This might be orbiting back to D&D conceits, and how everything ultimately leads to combat there, but there's often one obvious solution to all those failures: something attacks you. Then combat has an ordered sequence of events, so it's easy to see what comes next. But god forbid you can't immediately initiate combat off a failure. That's a more open-ended dilemma that games are way more uneven on handling. It also sounds like you're talking about how players often don't like facing the outcome of failure at all. They just want to know how well they succeed. It's partially a personal issue, but it is also an ongoing systemic problem that games struggle to make failures interesting. With combat, a missed attack that does absolutely nothing feels awful. A failed social check that slams a door in your face sucks. Or there's the notorious example of trying to solve a mystery and failing all the investigation checks to uncover clues, effectively softlocking progress. It all comes down to feeling like a waste of your in-game and OOC time and gets frustrating. hyphz posted:Some even take it further. No Thank You Evil has rules for big dramatic group action rolls and these are used at the climax of all the sample adventures. None of them ever consider the possibility of the roll failing, and in some cases they significantly break the adventure. No Thank You, Evil! is meant to be a game you run for a group of young-ish kids, and it's a Monte Cook game. I wouldn't call it well-designed at the best of times, but I'm guessing there's some implicit wink that the ~GM Discretion~ is supposed to kick in on a bad roll on one of those dramatic finishers and the kids beat the bad guy either way. All of the Cypher-system-like games use that as a messy band-aid when the rules give you no pathway forward. I'd agree it sucks overall.
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May 24, 2023 23:45
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Nuns with Guns posted:It also sounds like you're talking about how players often don't like facing the outcome of failure at all. They just want to know how well they succeed. It's partially a personal issue, but it is also an ongoing systemic problem that games struggle to make failures interesting. With combat, a missed attack that does absolutely nothing feels awful. A failed social check that slams a door in your face sucks. Or there's the notorious example of trying to solve a mystery and failing all the investigation checks to uncover clues, effectively softlocking progress. It all comes down to feeling like a waste of your in-game and OOC time and gets frustrating. I was trying to think more, not about the system issue, but about the learning issue. And the learning pattern for most RPGs tends to focus on success as the default, and failure as an abberation that has to be recovered from or worked around, rather than an equal part of the experience. But there is a system issue that more comes up when the dice can actually mess with narrative or characterisation. I mean, because I backed Evil Hat games before I recently was sent the preview of Girl By Moonlight, a magical girl game. Your magical girl transformation is called transcendence, and it talks a lot about it being your true self that you can realize temporarily - but you can only do it for a certain number of actions, and only once per mission. In a one-shot game, that's once in the entire story. When you're in transcendence, you get a bonus to your rolls, but it's just that, a bonus. Not a guarantee, especially when you allow for the fact that you're probably using your transcendence at a point when things get difficult. So there's a chance, maybe not a likely one but a chance, that you finally reveal your true self only to have it suck and fail at everything. I suspect that's not what was intended for the feel of the game, but it's still right there in the design. And since it's a FitD game, where complications are a possibility for failure, it might not just fail at everything but actively make things worse for your buddies too. And it can come up in any game. I mean, I'm sure people have played a game where the rogue had a bad run of dice luck and failed a bunch of their skill checks to the point where it's almost metagaming that they're kept in the party, because the players know they're rolling badly, but the PCs just know that someone's come along and joined them on the basis of claiming to be able to do infiltrations then constantly failed. hyphz fucked around with this message at 02:01 on May 25, 2023 |
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May 25, 2023 01:57
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Not familiar with the game, but magical girls occasionally failing at things even when transformed isn’t necessarily out of genre. The transformation being temporary and once per mission (does that mean per actual session, per some abstracted adventuring day vaguely representing a single anime episode, or per story arc?) is a bit odd, though. Maybe magical girls don’t usually transform multiple times per episode, but that’s usually because they don’t have occasion to, not because they can’t, right? Of course in an RPG context, you need to give players reasons to interact with the world in their civilian forms instead of staying transformed 24/7, but severely limiting transformation time like that seems like the wrong way of doing it. Surely a better answer would be that their power and/or sanity depends on maintaining emotional bonds with normal humans instead of just hanging out with talking weasels all the time?
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May 25, 2023 02:32
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Silver2195 posted:Not familiar with the game, but magical girls occasionally failing at things even when transformed isn’t necessarily out of genre. It's not out of the MG genre, but it is a jarring contrast against the general flavor text of the game, which represents transcendence as a cathartic moment of becoming the person you're otherwise forced to hide. And even occasionally failing isn't the problem - it's that there's no protection against regularly failing. I didn't post this example first time because I've mentioned it before, but it also happened to me directly in a PbtA game called The Sword, The Crown and the Unspeakable Power. It isn't too well designed as a PbtA game that I could tell. As the name implies, magic is the "Unspeakable Power" and it's pretty drat scary. IMHO it's already a design flaw that there's playbooks devoted to using magic, since it means that a player has no real choice not to do the scary thing whenever they want to be involved. But thanks to rolling misses at the wrong times - and these were PbtA misses, which mean hard GM moves, and they're supposed to make magic scary - after only two sessions my character was under a geas from a world-ending imprisoned dragon to perform a ritual he didn't understand, and had accidentally caused an innocent guard to explode into a bloody mess in front of tavern patrons by making a portal appear inside him. I just had to straight up admit to the GM at that point that the character was no longer playable in the party as no good or sane person would continue believing that using magic wasn't so bad after that had happened. The dice had pulled the rug out from under the character.
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May 25, 2023 12:28
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Sometimes I think players misconstrue the point of having a bunch of skill rolls when you do an otherwise mundane task- part of the purpose of this sort of thing, even when things are easy, is so that when you do, say, the equivalent of the 7-9 result in a PbtA game, having had characters with full skill lists roll things out, even if they're easy, kinda gives you the complication. Oh, our captain failed a shiphandling roll to get through the shoals, now we've run aground and our big ship has a hole in the hull. That's not a failure, that's a complication, and by having it done systematically, it doesn't have to be created whole-cloth, but kinda comes organically, and you can look at someone's character and say they messed something up. I think it's important that players understand this, that the meat of an adventure is really the complications of it, not so much the experience of, "we came, we saw, we looted". PbtAs are really not interesting when you're 10+ing everything, it's just a narrative of how badass your characters are, which is pure comic books dude stuff to me.
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May 25, 2023 12:41
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hyphz posted:I didn't post this example first time because I've mentioned it before, but it also happened to me directly in a PbtA game called The Sword, The Crown and the Unspeakable Power. It isn't too well designed as a PbtA game that I could tell. As the name implies, magic is the "Unspeakable Power" and it's pretty drat scary. IMHO it's already a design flaw that there's playbooks devoted to using magic, since it means that a player has no real choice not to do the scary thing whenever they want to be involved. But thanks to rolling misses at the wrong times - and these were PbtA misses, which mean hard GM moves, and they're supposed to make magic scary - after only two sessions my character was under a geas from a world-ending imprisoned dragon to perform a ritual he didn't understand, and had accidentally caused an innocent guard to explode into a bloody mess in front of tavern patrons by making a portal appear inside him. I just had to straight up admit to the GM at that point that the character was no longer playable in the party as no good or sane person would continue believing that using magic wasn't so bad after that had happened. The dice had pulled the rug out from under the character. So that means you were either playing the Adept, the Beloved, or the Hex. You mentioned a portal — that’s an Adept move (named Tear Reality). The Adept is framed as “either the story that parents use to scare their children when they put them to bed at night, or what they secretly hope those children will become when they grow up.” Other Adept moves include Arcane Malice and Power, Horrible Power. Further, the introduction to the game says “We had so much fun playing villainous, greedy, desperate people, we decided to dedicate some more time to turning it into something other people could try, and the result is what you are now reading.” A couple pages later: “While SCUP is a fantasy game, it isn’t about fighting dragons — it’s about scheming, dealing, threatening, and worse to get what you want, no matter the cost.” To drag this back to how we learn to play: what should be in the rulebook that would have told you SCUP characters weren’t intended to be good or sane, above what’s already there? What more needed to be done to tell you that characters who use magic should already have come to peace with the idea that using magic is awful?
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May 25, 2023 14:42
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Panzeh posted:Sometimes I think players misconstrue the point of having a bunch of skill rolls when you do an otherwise mundane task- part of the purpose of this sort of thing, even when things are easy, is so that when you do, say, the equivalent of the 7-9 result in a PbtA game, having had characters with full skill lists roll things out, even if they're easy, kinda gives you the complication. Oh, our captain failed a shiphandling roll to get through the shoals, now we've run aground and our big ship has a hole in the hull. That's not a failure, that's a complication, and by having it done systematically, it doesn't have to be created whole-cloth, but kinda comes organically, and you can look at someone's character and say they messed something up. This is probably a result of a shift in game objectives between more modern-ish games influenced by Apocalypse World's philosophies, versus something in the vein of D&D. With a D&D game, you start with the original objective descending from its wargame origins: move through a dungeon tactically, loot it for treasure, make it out alive, and you "win." Over time that's clearly broadened into more general "hero's journey" type growth. A player might not be succeeding because they're constantly looting treasure and amassing power that way, but they're still leveling up, becoming more famous, building relationships with powerful NPCs, and otherwise integrating themselves into the power structure of the world. Even if it is as roaming Texas Ranger-types or whatever. PbtA games expect complications to be more constant, since the numerical average roll is a mixed success. Because the objective is to create an interesting narrative, and messy complications to overcome are seen as part of what makes the story compelling. I really don't feel like litigating hyphz's difficulties processing what makes PbtA type games "work" more. I do think this could be shifted into looking at other games that do have different "objectives." Like, I've been re-reading King Arthur Pendragon in prep for trying to run it. It's a decades-old game that has a philosophy in stark contrast to D&D. Everyone's a knight and expected to behave in a "knightly" fashion, but that's behavior historically in line with Arthurian epics and it doesn't always align with modern social mores. It also has a focus on familial lineages and maintaining estates, because it does expect knights to grow in fame and prestige, but also be in mortal danger regularly. The family line is going to persevere past the original knight character if the game goes on long enough. I remember someone once describing Pendragon as a "niche killer" for being basically an ideal game for the sort of people who want to reenact Arthurian epics, and I can see why it scratches all the itches an Arthurian nerd has that can't be found in D&D.
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May 28, 2023 17:07
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Nuns with Guns posted:The push and pull of failure and success is absolutely innate to TTRPGs, I'd say. We wouldn't be deciding important actions through dice if we didn't want the risk of failure hanging over us. It's something that needs to be evenly applied across player actions though. It's also something where it helps if the players are voluntary participants in putting themselves at risk, and I like systems that reward that. I was going to say I was fine with the ebbs and flows of the dice but I actually realized I wasn't by the time I had finished writing the post. It comes down to how much of my effort, and how many good rolls, that can be undone by one bad dice roll. I get that's realistic. Believe me, I understand how single mistakes or single minutes of bad luck can erase years of good; I just don't want to roleplay this anymore. I'm okay with the dice saying I failed at the task I am actively trying, or ticking a clock to something I built falling apart. I'm not okay with the fact that the faction I spent 4 sessions befriending and convincing I'm good hates me now because the entanglement roll said someone has to hate me now. But you're right that communication is the key and in the latest game and discussed this ahead of time and my frustrations with these aspects and I think there's been a better balance and more thoughtful responses to the dice.
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Jun 2, 2023 20:39
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Rick posted:I was going to say I was fine with the ebbs and flows of the dice but I actually realized I wasn't by the time I had finished writing the post. It comes down to how much of my effort, and how many good rolls, that can be undone by one bad dice roll. I get that's realistic. Believe me, I understand how single mistakes or single minutes of bad luck can erase years of good; I just don't want to roleplay this anymore. I'm okay with the dice saying I failed at the task I am actively trying, or ticking a clock to something I built falling apart. I'm not okay with the fact that the faction I spent 4 sessions befriending and convincing I'm good hates me now because the entanglement roll said someone has to hate me now. You're hitting on something I've noticed, too, as far as there being inconsistencies in the level of fallout a "failure" has. Someone putting a ton of time into befriending a faction doesn't sound like something (to me at least) that should be undone by a single bad roll. However, that's also something that doesn't seem like it's discussed much. Same with the aforementioned issue with a failed roll killing all forward momentum. It reminds me of a notorious moment in Disco Elysium, where you and Kim Kitsuragi are dancing in a club you set up. If you fail a specific roll, your character has an impassioned outburst that includes calling Kim a racial slur. This is irrespective of any prior choices you made to avoid saying racist stuff to Kim before. It's pretty awkward and mortifying and obviously intended to feel that way. It also won't instantly drive Kim away. You can double down on poo poo and it will de-escalate. Or what does drive Kim off is option to be repeatedly racist in front of him and to him. The game can still proceed without Kim, but it's certainly a very different story without his presence, and it takes a lot of um... "work" to opt into that. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Jun 3, 2023 |
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Jun 3, 2023 19:45
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